SSN checking and formatting
Here’s something I worked on a few days ago. It shows six ways of verifying that an incoming string has nine numeric characters and then returns a string in the standard social security number format....
View ArticleEntity Framework in an Dynamics Nav (Navision) environment (or using EF to...
Summary In this post I should how to use dynamic compilation to allow Entity Framework to reference tables whose names are not known at compile time. Details Entity Framework works great for the...
View ArticleDrop down lists in ASP.NET MVC
This post shows two methods of implementing drop down lists in ASP.NET MVC 4. The code for data access and the general layout of the application should not be considered suitable for anything other...
View ArticleAdaptive/dynamic page numbering in c#
If you need to show many results (tens, hundreds or thousands), in a paged manner, you won’t want to display links to all those pages. I looked online for some c# that would adapt the number of page...
View ArticleDeserializing to an enum
I have an application where I deserialize an xml stream from a third party. One of the fields is a task code which can be one of only three values, insert, update and delete. This is an obvious...
View ArticleSerializing a stack to XML in C#
Serializing a class to XML in C# is straightforward; most collections can be easily serialized also. Something like the following will work in most scenarios – public string...
View ArticleAltering the ASP.NET MVC model with an ActionFilter
Action filters are executed before and/or after the execution of an action method, they can be used to modify how an action executes or to perform a separate task, such as authorization or logging....
View ArticleSkipping ActionFilters in ASP.NET MVC
In the previous post I showed how you can use an action filter to execute code both before and after an action method and how to apply the filter globally. I found myself in a scenario where I wanted...
View ArticleMaking a column sparse with Entity Framework Migrations
I have a database built off code first models, but I want to set some of the columns to sparse. There isn’t a way to this with the fluent api or through annotations. But it can be done with a...
View ArticleAdding ROWGUIDCOL to Entity Framework Code First using migrations
To add add a ROWGUIDCOL to a unique identifier in a table using code first you have to use code migrations. Below is the snippet you need. I haven’t covered how to perform a migration because there are...
View ArticleEntity Framework lazy loading vs explicit loading and the generated SQL
Download the source code here. If you are using lazy loading with Entity Framework you should check that queries to the database are working as expected. A lazy load call to something like...
View ArticleClik here to view.
CastleWindsor chained dependency
Source code is available here. I recently had a problem where I wanted an MVC controller to use constructor injection of specified dependency and have that dependency load another specified dependency...
View ArticleSaving enums as strings with Entity Framework
In September 2018 I wrote a new post explaining how to store enums as ints or strings with Entity Framework Core. It is a nicer solution than the one presented here. Full source code here. I hit a...
View ArticleUsing JSON to store application preferences and configuration
Download full source code. Storing configuration preferences in the database is not a hard task. It usually involves storing the name of the preference, the value and the type in the database. Then...
View ArticleComplex model validation using Fluent Validation
Full source code is available here. A common problem is validating an object using a complicated set of rules. I started using the Fluent Validation package some time back, it is commonly used with MVC...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mass Transit with RabbitMQ Hello World
Full source code is available here. Below is an example of how to use RabbitMQ with Mass Transit service bus. See here for instructions on how to install Rabbit MQ. Mass Transit is installed via nuget,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Entity Framework non null foreign key migration
Overview This post gives a quick overview of how to use Entity Framework migrations and a detailed example of how to handle the addition of a new non null foreign keyed column to an existing table with...
View ArticleFinding the Location of a Running Assembly in .Net
For many reasons you might want to know where a running assembly is located on your filesystem. I had to do this once when I was compiling classes at runtime and had a dependency on EntityFramework....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Entity Framework Migrations with an existing database
Introduction If you read my post on Entity Framework migrations, you might be saying, “that’s amazing, but that’s all very well for new projects, but we’ve got eighty tables in place already and that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Entity Framework with Proper Foreign Key Names
Full source code here. One of the very nice features of Entity Framework is the navigational properties. But it is easy to set them up in a less that optimal way. If you have ever ended up with a...
View Article